i think i'm losing my mind (just keeping my head above water)
by I Took the One Less Travelled
Summary: Brian returns to the Toretto home following the battle with Loki in the Avengers. Sequel to I'm Trapped In This Comedy of Errors (Or Maybe an Error of a Comedy), and second in my Brian O'Connor SHIELD Agent 'verse.


Brian's worries over not being forgiven were abated when Mia came flying out of the house and slammed into him, arms around his neck. "Brian!" she said desperately, burrowing her face into his shoulder. "You're all right. We weren't sure, we didn't even know if you were in the middle of that mess." He grunted when she made contact with his bruised (okay, _fractured_ ) (okay, _broken_ ) ribs, but let his arms encircle her for a moment of comfort for as long as he could stand the pain.

"Nah, I'm okay," Brian assured her. He gently pushed her off. "Mia, this is Clint Barton, a… colleague. Barton, Mia Toretto."

Mia offered a hand. "Nice to meet you," she said. "Come on in, everyone wants to yell at Bri a bit."

"Nice to meet you too," Clint said, smiling charmingly—if a bit duller than usual. Nobody could blame him, and Brian had figured that Clint needed someplace to go after… everything.

"Mia," Brian said. "I _wasn't_ , you know. In the middle of that mess. Just thought that you should know." He figured that it would be better not to mention that he'd barely escaped with his life when Loki had set off the Tessaract and collapsed a building on top of him, and then he'd been in the middle of a fight on the helicarrier when Loki had been breaking out.

"Oh, good," Mia said after a moment. "So, then, you must have gotten that gash on the side of your head when you _missed_ while you were shaving, then," she added, tone flinty. Brian winced and reached his fingers up to hover over the chunk of skin missing from his temple and into his hairline. The wound looked worse than it was; big but not very deep, mostly just the surface couple layers of skin surrounding a slightly deeper gouge that had been a casualty of the falling debris when the Tessaract had blown and buried them under the base in Staten Island.

Barton, the bastard, just laughed. "She's got you there, O'Connor."

"There were a few other fights," Brian admitted, groaning. "It's fine, Mia, I'm fine, I've got a couple of cracked ribs and that, and some other bruises and that's the worst of it."

Mia's eyes widened. "Cracked ribs? And I hugged you, oh, I'm so sorry, did I hurt you?"

" _No_ ," Brian assured her. "I'm fine. It's just been… a really long-ass few days, right Barton?"

Barton sighed, bone-deep and world-weary. "You could say that," he said softly.

"Come in, come in," Mia said after a moment, ushering them both up the front step and through the doors. "Guys, guess who's home?" She called through the house. "Letty? Dom?"

"Well look at that, it's 'not a cop'," Vince was parked on the couch in front of the TV, watching infomercials with a beer and an ice pack.

"Hey, man," Brian said, not really caring to deal with Vince right now. "I'm glad you're okay."

"Yeah, they… we figure you saved my life," Vince grunted, after a second. "So that was pretty decent of you. Thanks," he added grudgingly.

"Nah, I was so damn bored by then that you did me a favour, giving me an excuse to jump out of a moving vehicle," Brian said seriously.

"You were playing undercover mole, playing us, the Trans, _and_ the cops and feds, and you were _bored_?" Vince demanded incredulously.

"Vince, be nice to Brian, he's injured too," Mia said sternly.

"Mia, it's a few broken ribs, I'm _fine_ ," Brian protested. "A few weeks of tape and moving slowly, that's all. I'm on medical leave and everything."

Barton cracked up. "As if you don't regard that as a punishment," he commented.

"So do you," Brian snapped back without thinking.

"I'm not on medical leave, O'Connor," Barton said softly. Brian kicked himself—Clint wasn't on medical leave, Clint was on psych hold. After being compromised by Loki's fucking glowstick, nobody was sure what the effects would have had on his mind or if he should be in the field yet. SHIELD was firmly divided into two camps—those that didn't trust him, and those that thought that he might try to get himself killed out of guilt.

"Right," Brian muttered.

There was an awkward silence, that Vince took it upon himself to break. "Broken ribs, hey, you can join the ice-pack club," he said, awkwardly enthusiastic. "Come on, sit down, we can make bets on who can find worse shit on daytime TV and make everyone else fetch beer for our pathetic asses."

Brian laughed out loud. Maybe Vince wasn't such a dick after all. "Vince, Clint, Clint, Vince," Brian introduced rapidly. "We work together."

There was a pause and then, "So _were_ you in that mess in New York?" Vince asked. "We weren't sure when it showed up on the news."

"No, no," Brian shook his head. "I was helping run communications from the 'carrier."

"I was," Clint said unexpectedly.

"Oh?" Vince looked at him appraisingly, a relatively decent fighter assessing another's skills. Brian figured that they could let poor Vince live with the illusion that he could possibly hold a candle to either of them. "What do you do? And do you have a cool nickname? Dom said that buster's here is _Bullitt_. Assuming because of the driving," he tacked on.

Clint's lips twitched upwards, a long cry from his usual broad grin, but progress. "Hawkeye," he said. "I'm a sniper."

Brian laughed. "That's true. This man can hit anything," he added. "What does it tell you that the military is willing to overlook a propensity for medieval weaponry? That he's the fucking best, that's what."

"Medieval weaponry?" Mia asked. She'd left the room, and was on her way back with three beers in her hands. She handed one to each Brian and Clint, and kept the third for herself, curling up like a cat on the nearest chair. Taking the cue to sit, Brian stepped back and dropped onto the loveseat, and Clint took the seat beside him after a second of hesitation.

"Bow and arrow," Clint admitted, his lips twitching.

"Really," Mia said interestedly. "I went to summer camp when I was thirteen," she added brightly. "They did archery there. I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, let alone a target."

Brian snorted. "This is the guy that nails the black dot in the centre of the target, and then continues to split the arrow up the center with each following shot," he said. "When people want to get snarky with him, they generally call him either Merida, Katniss or Legolas."

"Shut up, O'Connor. Least nobody calls me Lightning McQueen," Clint fired back.

"Low," Brian muttered. "I know where you sleep."

"Do you?" Clint snipped back.

"You have quarters on the helicarrier and in the Trikselion and Hub, and you have an apartment building in Bed-Stuy, a farm in Iowa and sometimes you camp out in the rafters above the shooting range, just to freak people out," Brian retorted.

Clint snickered. "They all get so hissy about it, it's hilarious."

"You can also be found crawling around the air ducts at pretty much any time throughout the day and night," Brian added as an aside.

"What can I say, I like my transportation clear of crowds," Clint said flippantly. Then his mood darkened. "Be better if I didn't have such good aim, O'Connor," he added softly, eyes gone dark.

"No," Brian said instantly. "Do _not_ start that again, Barton, it wasn't your fault."

"I didn't even… I didn't even _fight_ him, Selvig fought back, he built a failsafe into the Tessaract portal, I didn't, I just did everything he told me," Clint muttered.

"Hey, no you didn't," Brian said. " _Hey_. _World's greatest marksman_. Isn't it kind of funny that you missed more shots in _ten minutes_ than you have in the last _decade_? And, you _knew_ that Nat was coming after you, and you just _happened_ to be wandering around the bowels of the ship, in the worst possible place for you to be fighting her? You couldn't have picked a worse place to go head-to-head with Natasha Romanoff if you tried, Clint—but that's just it, I think that you _did_ try. You let her take your bow, which would have been your only chance of beating her, and then you let her beat the shit out of you."

"She didn't beat the shit out of me," Clint protested faintly.

"Nah, she just beat Loki out of your skull," Brian said knowingly.

"Have you ever had someone reach into your brain and make it their playground?" Clint asked huskily. "Stick their fingers inside and rearrange it to suit their purposes? Take you out, put something else in? Do you know what it is to be _unmade_?"

"You know that I can't even imagine, Barton," Brian said softly. "That's why you came with me instead of Nat, isn't it? Because she understands and I don't, and you don't want someone to understand right now."

"Nat will be here in a few days," Clint said evenly. "She's hovering, she'll get tired of waiting for me to ask her to come and just show up." He looked up at Vince and Mia, both of whom looked shocked, confused and awkward. "Alien mind control can be a bitch," he added quietly.

" _Alien mind control_?" Mia demanded, rocketing to her feet. "Is that what you've gotten my brother into, Brian?"

"Mia," Brian tried.

"Is that what this is? Did you save his ass from jail, and instead of sitting at home alone, wondering how he's doing locked in a cage, I'll be sitting at home alone worrying and wondering if he's getting _blown up_ , or _alien mind-controlled_? Is it going to be like watching the news the other day, paralyzed with fear because you might have been in the middle of that and we didn't even know for sure?"

"Mia, it's," Brian tried again, but trailed off because _he didn't know what to tell her_. It wasn't like it wasn't dangerous—hell of a lot more dangerous than the average street race, in fact. It wasn't like people didn't get killed in the line of duty _all the time_. It wasn't like he could promise that Dom would be okay, or even that he'd do everything that he could to always protect him, because him and Dom wouldn't always be on the same missions—in fact, in the beginning it was pretty much guaranteed that they _wouldn't_ be, because you didn't send trainee agents into the kind of shit that Brian dealt with.

"It won't be like that," Clint unexpectedly helped him out. "Because most of the shit that we do doesn't end up on the news. Not gonna lie to you; you don't strike me as the kind of person to appreciate a comforting lie over the unvarnished truth. What we do, it's dangerous. But it also makes the world better, and that makes it worth it. Now," he sighed. "Most of us don't have anything to come home to; here's O'Connor, coming to people he met a month ago on an undercover op after the most grueling, exhausting mission of his career—and here's me, tagging along with him to see people I've never met, because I don't have any civilians to make me forget what happened, and as much as O'Connor and Nat are my family, being around just them right now would make my head explode."

Brian tried not to shift uncomfortably as Mia realized that Barton was right.

Then he fell onto something to distract himself, and seized it with both hands. "What about Rogers? Where did he go?"

Clint snorted. "Got on his bike and drove away; told SHIELD not to monitor him and that he was going on a road trip."

Brian snorted, too. "Fat chance of that happening. Does he actually believe that they'll stay off of him?"

"He gave them the Captain America is Disappointed in You face, and let me tell you—the man _radiates_ patriotism. I'd follow him back into the field any day of the week. Said something about wanting to see the world's biggest ball of twine."

"Captain America went on a road trip through middle America to see the world's biggest ball of twine," Brian said flatly. "Right after the planet's first alien invasion. I'm sure there's a punch-line in there somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is."

"Second alien invasion," Clint corrected. "Thor showed up in New Mexico first, remember?"

"And Nat went…"

Clint rolled his eyes. "Fuck if I know where Nat went; she'll surface when she wants to be found."

"And Thor?" Brian prodded.

Clint snorted darkly, his eyes carrying more than a hint of anger that betrayed how _dangerous_ he could be when he wanted to be. "He had to get his shit-for-brains little brother back to Daddy," he muttered viciously.

Brian snorted. "Hope Daddy kicks his ass," he commented, his own tone just as livid.

"And Banner drove off with Stark to see his R&D department," Clint said, shrugging. "Why, did Hill tell you to monitor us? We are the Avengers Initiative, you'd think that we can take care of ourselves."

"Stark," Brian said flatly. "Take care of himself? You must be _joking_. And you can barely make pancakes that aren't from a mix, you can't be trusted to take care of yourself either."

"Hey!"

"O'Connor." Dom was standing in the doorway, wearing his usual jeans and white t-shirt combo. The shirt was covered in smears of grease that indicated that he'd been in the garage, probably trying to fix up his father's Charger from the unfortunate collision with that semi.

"Hey, Dom," Brian said, nodding at him.

"Are you all right?" Dom asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

"Yeah, fine," Brian assured him. "Few broken ribs, some bruises and cuts. Three weeks' minimum of mandatory medical leave."

Dom then produced something from the table in the hall behind him, and frisbeed it to Brian without looking. Brian caught it, and recognized the grey file with the SHIELD logo on the front. He flipped it open, and discovered that it was the profile that he'd built on Dom and his closest associates.

Dom's eyebrow arched as he stepped into the room. "Pretty fair assessment, all things considered," he said lowly. "Harsh, but. Poor impulse control, no subtlety, adrenaline addiction—that's fair," he added, smirking. "Hair-trigger temper," he tacked on darkly.

"Hey," Brian said, flipping open the file to find the part where he had assessed Dom's personality. "That's not what I said—I said that you were fairly calm _unless_ someone hit one of your hot buttons—and I said that there wasn't much danger of that in the field, because mostly your hot buttons involve people threatening your family."

"That laundry list of flaws," Dom commented. "I don't know why the hell you tapped me for recruitment. Don't know why the hell your handler said yes."

Brian flinched, and so did Clint, but they studiously avoided looking at each other. _Coulson_.

Instead Brian focused on Dom's actual sentence. "All of those things have a flip side, and they have use, Dom. Poor impulse control—that means that you're highly instinct-driven, good at reacting in a split second and you follow your gut, which is often right. No subtlety—did you miss the part where we weren't recruiting a spy? We don't _want_ you to be subtle, because by the time that you get there, the time for subtle is over. Leave the spy shit to people like me and him and Nat," Brian added, jerking a thumb and Clint. "You just make as much noise as you always do."

"And the adrenaline addiction?"

Brian snorted. "Ain't nobody at SHIELD that _doesn't_ have one of those, bro," he said in response. "Aside from that; you're damn good with people, which means that you may actually be able to be a handler one day—you can handle _me_ , trust me, you can talk down some two-bit baby agent that wants to go off the grid. Probably couldn't deal with, you know, that one, or Nat—but they're probably pretty much done with covert ops anyway, so…"

"Hey, now," Clint said mildly.

"Please, the last mission that they let you two do together, you'd cut your handlers out and disappeared off the grid within fourteen hours," Brian snapped. "You ignored your extraction team, caused about three international incidents, nearly started a _war_ with North Korea, pissed off not just _one_ branch of the mafia but _three_ , and wandered back into HQ three weeks later, after crossing the border with an ID that SHIELD didn't even know that you _had_ —looking like you'd been run over by a semi-truck, while Nat didn't even have so much as a scratch on her."

Clint snickered. "Oh, right, I'd forgotten about that," he commented cheerfully. "That was _fun_. And HR tells me I don't take enough vacation."

"I don't think that that qualifies as HR's definition of vacation," Brian pointed out, dry as the Sahara.

"Yeah, but HR has a shit-ass boring definition of vacation," Clint whined. "They want me to like, go and _lay on the beach_ for a week, or go to places in Europe that I've seen a hundred thousand times before, and see them again,"

"Well that seems dumb," Brian said, smirking.

"Yeah, well," Clint said. "Gina might have phrased it more like… ' _without killing anyone this time, Barton, Jesus Christ_ '."

"You give Gina lip," Brian said, shaking his head in mock disappointment. "Well, you're either a braver man than I am, or a stupider one. Money on the stupider one," he added.

Right when Clint opened his mouth to retort to that, his phone suddenly let out an impossibly loud, piercing, continuous blaring sound. Clint grimaced. "I have to," he murmured softly. "It's Rogers."

"I thought he went on a road trip?" Brian asked.

"Well," Clint said wryly. "Remember when I said that Nat was hovering? She's not the only one," he added. "Rogers nags like a grandmother, Stark asked me to _move in with him_ , and Thor promised that he'd bring some magic trauma cure-all from Asgard."

"This Avengers Initiative thing, it isn't going away, is it?" Brian asked softly.

"No," Clint said, grimacing. "No, I don't think that it is." He stood up at the same time as he lifted his phone to his ear, answering, "Yeah," softly as he headed for the front door. "No, no, Cap, I'm fine," Clint continued quietly. " _Steve_ , sorry," was the last thing that anyone heard as he pulled the front door shut behind him.

Brian braced his elbows on his knees. "World's changing now, Dom," he said mildly. "I think you're gonna thank me for helping you be part of it."

Dom snorted and dropped into Clint's vacated spot on the loveseat. "Well, I did notice the alien army in a portal above New York," he pointed out.


End file.
